Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/644

 616 PERSIA [SASANIAN EMPIRE. meats, was utterly defeated and slain on his first meeting with a regular Persian host in the hard- fought &quot; battle of the bridge &quot; at the Euphrates, and MothannA had great difficulty in saving the remains of the army (26th Novem ber 634). Not without hesitation the caliph Omar resolved to send a greater force to Irak, calling on his Arabs to win for themselves the treasures of the Khosraus and paradise ; and now for the first time a considerable Persian army was defeated at Bowaib (635 or 636), with the loss of its general, a prince of the house of Mihran. In Sa d ibn AM Wakk&s the Moslems had now an ener getic and cautious leader, and the Persian court began to see its danger, especially when the news arrived of the battle of Yarmuk, by which Syria was lost to Heraclius. Rustam in person placed himself at the head of a great army, over which, in sign of the gravity of the enterprise, was borne the venerable sacred banner of the empire (dirafshi kdviydii). Sa d fell back before the Persian advance and posted himself at Kddisiya on the edge of the desert south or south-west of Hira, where the armies lay facing each other for months. The Arab force must have been inferior in strength, for no great army could have long held such a barren post nourished only by forays and what the caliph could send from Medina. At length, towards the close of the year 636, or in 637, battle was joined and raged for several days, Sa d giving orders to his men in spite of a sickness under which he laboured. The Persians were better armed, but the Arabs fought with desperate energy. The elephants, which formed part of every regular Persian army, greatly terrified them at first, but ultimately these huge beasts, getting out of com mand, only aided the discomfiture of the Persians. Of the mass of a Persian host no great bravery was to be expected ; yet it was only after a hard fight that the victory was de cided, Rustam slain, and the sacred banner taken. The battle of Kadisiya virtually decided the fate of the Tigris valley ; but there was still some fighting on the plains of Babylonia, at Birs (Bomppa), and Seleucia was not taken without a lengthy siege. Then the Arabs crossed the Tigris and fell on Ctesiphon, Yazclegerd fleeing before them to Holwan on the Medo-Babylonian frontier. At JalulA on the road to Holwan the Arabs gained a fresh victory over Rustam s brother, Khorrezadh, and Yazdegerd continued his flight. Meantime another body of Arabs had occupied Lower Irak and entered Susiana. A strong and wise leader might still perhaps have saved Iran proper, and Omar, as energetic as cautious, was in fact slow to allow his armies to assail the highlands. It was not till some time between 640 and 642 that the &quot; victory of victories,&quot; as the Arabs rightly call it, was gained at NehAvend (a little south of the old high road from Babylon to Ecbatana), and the last great army of the Persians was shattered by No man, who fell on the Over- field, and the Meccan Hodhaifa. Even now many indi- throw o vidual provinces and cities did not yield without stubborn eill l )ire - resistance, and in many places rebellion after rebellion had to be crushed, especially in the region around Istakhr, the cradle and sacred hearth of the fallen monarchy. Everywhere the great local barons and even the lesser nobility dealt with the Arabs as independent chiefs, and in many cases came to peaceful terms with them. Yazdegerd fled from one to another of his lieutenants without venturing himself to strike a blow for his crown and his life. He still retained the forms of sovereignty, and coins were still struck in his name ; but one host after another dismissed him as a burdensome guest, and at length he was miserably murdered in the remote dis trict of Merv, not, it would appear, without the conniv ance of Mahoe, governor of that province (651 or 652). The great similarity in the ends of the Achamienian and Sasanian empires is no mere accident, but significant of the internal resem blance between the two. Granicus which showed the reality of the danger, Issns which lost Darius his western provinces, Gaugamela which broke up the monarchy and yet did not at once give pos session of the several lands of the realm, have their parallels a thousand years later at Bowaib, Kadisi ya, and Nehavend. The flight of Darius to the farthest north-east, and his death by the hand of traitors, not of the foe, are repeated in the fate of Yazde gerd, who resembles Darius also in his lack of heroism. The nobles showed more loyalty and patriotism against the Arabs than against Alexander, and indeed religious antipathy and the bar barism of the Arabs made it less easy in the later case for a Persian to accept the foreign yoke ; yet even now there were too many traitors and deserters among the nobles high and low. Fully to subdue the Persian monarchy cost the Arabs a much longer time than it had cost the Macedonians ; but the conquest went far deeper, Hellenism never touched more than the surface of Persian life, but Iran, was penetrated to the core by Arabic religion and Arabian ways. Sec MOHAMMEDANISM. A fragment of the Sasanian empire lasted for a considerable time in the mountains of Tabaristdn (Mazandaran), to which the here ditary generals (Spdhpat, Is^chbcdh] of Khorasan, of the house of Karen, withdrew, and where they reigned for over a hundred years, thougfi sometimes paying tribute to the caliphs. They remained faithful to Zoroastrianism, and apparently viewed themselves as direct successors of Yazdegerd, since the era employed on their coins seems to have his death as its epoch. Literature. G. Bawlinson, The Seventh Great Oriental Monarchy (London, 1876), is inadequate. Fuller but still inadequate use of Oriental sources is made by Spiegel, Eranische Alterthiimcr, vol. iii. (Leipsic, 1878). The docu mentary evidence is mostly collected in Noldeke s translation of Tabari (Geschichte der Perser, &c., Leyclen, 1879). For the relations of the Sas.inians with Rome, Tillemont. Hist, des Empereurs, and Clinton, Fasti liomani, must be used, and Saint -Martin s notes to Lebeau, Hist, du Has- Empire (Paris, 1828-36), are still useful. A great deal of serviceable matter is to lie found in Hoffmann s translation of excerpts from the Syriac Acts of Persian Martyrs (Syrische Akten Persischer Miirtyrer, Leipsic, 1880). (TIL X.) PART II MODERN PERSIA. SECTION I. GEOGRAPHY AND STATISTICS. Plate LONG prior to the Christian era the satrapies of Cyrus VIII. comprehended roughly an immense range of territory, from the Mediterranean to the Indus and from the Caucasian chain and Jaxartes to the Persian Gulf and Aiabian Ocean. In the 17th and 18th centuries A.D. the conquests of Abbas and Nadir kept up these boundaries more or less on the east, but failed to secure them on the west, and were limited to the Caucasus and Oxus on the north. Persia of the present day is not only, in the matter of geographical definition, far from the vast empire of Sacred Writ and remote history, but it is not even the less extensive, though very expansive dominion of the Safawi kings and Nadir Shah. It may be said, however, to comprise now quite as much settled and consolidated territory as at any period of its political existence of which we can speak with the authority of intimate acquaintance. If it has less extent of land than before its latest disastrous war with Russia, there is certainly within its recognized limits less rebellion and more allegiance. And, if the true interests of Persia, considered as a living power, were only understood by her kings and ministers, she might reason ably seek to attain a state of security which would amply compensate for the loss of precarious and profitless ex panse. boundaries. The region of Ararat presents a good starting-point for the definition of a western and northern boundary to the kingdom of Nasru d-Din Shah. East of the Greater Ararat a short oblique line from the Arras to the south-west divides it from Russia. Below this begins the Perso-Turkish frontier, for the settlement ofTurk&amp;lt; which a mixed commission was appointed in 1843. The 1&amp;gt;ersi ! outcome of the labours of this commission, which lasted ! more than twenty -five years, has been rather a careful delineation of the disputed tract than the delimitation of